A college freshman named Mako watches a cooking show on her phone. She loves food but is extremely shy and timid and can’t bring herself to venture into crowded restaurants alone. Later, on campus, three college girls seek to register a Food Culture Research Club, but they need a fourth member to be allowed to proceed. Shinon—the girl leading the effort to found the club—has a chance encounter with Mako; they knew each other back in elementary school. Mako meets the other two girls as well. Later that evening, Mako runs into one of those other girls—Kurea—and finds out her family owns the restaurant Mako had been hungrily admiring earlier in the episode. Cooking and eating of katsudon ensues, and the whole experience helps Mako build up her courage to reconnect with Shinon and join the club. After officially registering the club with its four members, the group heads off to visit their new club room, only for Shinon to drop a bombshell: She just wanted her own club room to hang out in, and the whole “food culture research” bit was just to disguise her true intentions. Cue the bemused/disappointed reactions.
This is clearly supposed to be a cute-girls-doing-cute-things anime. Unfortunately, while the girls have generic anime cuteness, the crucial “doing-cute-things” ingredient somehow got left out of the recipe. There’s quite a bit of whining and yelling throughout the episode, unseasoned by any charm or humor. Mako ranges from pitiable to pathetic, while Shinon varies from whiny to overbearing. Poor Kurea seems normal enough, but she can’t carry the whole show by herself. And I don’t even remember the fourth girl’s name. The whole chance-meeting-into-club-recruitment scenario is familiar and predictable, rather than stirring one’s appetite. And where Laid-Back Camp offered gorgeous scenery, here we get a focus on food that bored me at best and disgusted me at worst (I will not eat raw egg and rice stirred together, not even with ketchup; I do not like them, Sam-I-Am). Basically, not one element of this episode went down smoothly for me. If your soul has an intense craving for a new CGDCT show, this might assuage your hunger, but otherwise I recommend ordering something else.
Food for the Soul is streaming on Crunchyroll.
[…] up to be some sort of weird fusion of those genres. And I am totally on board with it! Unlike Green Eggs and Ham: The Anime, I thought this was genuinely cute and charming and silly in equal measures. As added bonuses, the […]
[…] Read More […]